Last CfP: Commonsense and NMR for Ontologies

Sincere apologies for multiple postings.

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                   CALL FOR PAPERS

               The NMR'2010 Workshop on
Commonsense and Non-Monotonic Reasoning for Ontologies

         http://ksg.meraka.org.za/nmronto2010

               Collocated With KR'2010

                    May 14-16 2010
             Sutton Place, Toronto, Canada
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-- Workshop Description --

  Classical reasoning over ontologies has reached the point where it can deal with large real-world ontologies. This can largely be attributed to advances in research on description logics (DLs). A good example is the medical ontology SNOMED-CT, containing over 300,000 concepts and millions of binary relationships between them. SNOMED-CT can be represented as a DL ontology, and its subsumption hierarchy can be computed in a matter of minutes.

  The obvious next step now is to extend reasoning over ontologies to cover non-classical cases, such as commonsense reasoning, a well established branch of AI. The first steps in that direction have been done by the ontology community, and while research along these lines has already resulted in initial tangible results, there is a need for a more coherent approach in order to speed up progress.

  This need provides interesting challenges to both the ontology and commonsense reasoning communities. For the commonsense reasoning community it is a chance to determine to what extent techniques developed in its sub-areas, like e.g. non-monotonic reasoning (NMR), can be tailored to the requirements of the ontology community. For the ontology community it is an opportunity to determine whether existing results in this area can be sharpened and improved on by referring to results in the broader area of commonsense reasoning.

  The topic of the workshop will hence be combining commonsense reasoning approaches and techniques with ontologies. One of the main motivations is to bring ideas from the well developed area of non-monotonic reasoning, like e.g. reasoning about actions, argumentation and belief revision, for discussion in the realm of ontology engineering: evolution, debugging, update, merging, etc. Certainly these tasks can benefit from most of the advances in NMR and give new insights for research in that area as well.

  Commonsense and Non-Monotonic Reasoning for Ontologies will be of interest to:

  - Researchers in the ontology community, particularly DL researchers, interested in extending ontological reasoning to non-classical cases.

  - Researchers in the knowledge representation and commonsense reasoning community interested in applying existing NMR techniques to the area of ontologies.

   This workshop will focus on an emerging hot topic. As such, one of its immediate outcomes will be boosting a new and exciting hybrid research domain combining commonsense reasoning and knowledge engineering for ontologies.


-- Topics of Interest --

Submissions are welcome on the role of commonsense and non-monotonic reasoning for ontologies in areas that include but are not limited to the following ones: 

- Ontology Debugging and Update
- Ontology Merging, Alignment and Integration
- Inconsistency Handling
- Belief Revision and Theory Change for ontologies 
- Uncertainty Handling, Defeasible Reasoning and Argumentation in ontologies 
- Heuristic and Approximate Reasoning
- NMR methods for light-weight DL ontologies
- Planning and Reasoning about Action and Change on the Semantic Web
- Rules and Ontologies 
- Temporal and Spatial Reasoning
- Ontology Fault Diagnosis and Repair
- Preferences and Ontologies
- Formal Concept Analysis and Ontologies


-- Submission Instructions --

  Authors are kindly requested to follow the instructions for authors on the NMR website at
http://www.cs.sfu.ca/news/conferences/NMR/2010/NMR_2010/Author_Instructions.html

Please submit to http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nmronto2010


-- Important Dates

- Papers due: January 29 (Friday), 2010
- Notification: March 1 (Monday), 2010
- Final version: April 6 (Tuesday), 2010
- Workshop: May 14-16, 2010


-- Additional Information --

  Please visit the NMR website at
http://www.cs.sfu.ca/news/conferences/NMR/2010/NMR_2010/NMR10.html
for more information about NMR, the venue of the workshop, the city of Toronto, accommodation and travel tips.

  In October 2010 there will be a special conference on 30 years of Non-monotonic Reasoning (NonMon@30):

  http://sites.google.com/site/nonmonat30/home

  The Journal of AI Research (JAIR) has agreed to publish a special issue on non-monotonic reasoning based, in part, on technical presentations to be given at the NonMon@30 conference. For this special issue there will be an open CFP that would allow, in particular, to include papers presented at NMR to be eligible for consideration.

  The Journal of Philosophical Logic has also agreed to publish a special NMR 30th anniversary issue. Authors of the best philosophically inclined papers drawn from NMR2010 and KR2010 will be invited submit papers to this special issue. 


-- Workshop Chairs --

- Ivan José Varzinczak (Meraka Institute, South Africa)
  http://ksg.meraka.org.za/~ivarzinczak
- Renata Wassermann (Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil)
  http://www.ime.usp.br/~renata

-- Program Committee --

- Grigoris Antoniou (University of Crete and Information Systems Laboratory, Greece)
- Fábio Cozman (Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil)
- Giorgos Flouris (University of Crete and Information Systems Laboratory, Greece)
- Norman Foo (University of New South Wales, Australia)
- Zhisheng Huang (Free University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
- Jos Lehmann (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom)
- Maurice Pagnucco (University of New South Wales, Australia)
- Jeff Pan (University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom)
- Bijan Parsia (University of Manchester, United Kingdom)
- Laurent Perrussel (Université de Toulouse 1, France)
- Guilin Qi (Southeast University, China)


--
Ivan José Varzinczak - http://ksg.meraka.org.za/~ivarzinczak
Knowledge Systems Group - Meraka Institute - CSIR
Pretoria, South Africa